Since leaving early access, Foundation has amassed tons of players to experience this cozy city builder. While the rules of the game may seem pretty simple, there is a lot going on within that will make things a bit difficult to understand. Once you start your simple village, you will find some villagers have appeared to make a settlement. But you need to keep growing your town into a huge city filled with various inhabitants to help you prosper. In this guide we will show you how to increase the population in Foundation.
How To Increase Population In Foundation
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Your villagers are the driving force to your city, and without them, your city won’t amount to much. As such, as soon as you start building your first house, people will start showing up to occupy it. Next, you also need to meet their demands and increase happiness. If you check out the progression tab on the top of the screen, it will show you your village’s prosperity. You must keep unlocking various research from the progression tree and implementing them in your village to make your villagers happy.
Build & Upgrade Settlements
Your first implementation is to upgrade houses. Not only will they allow more people to get accommodation, but they will also make commoners happy to get better housing. Upgrading houses will make the area more desirable to live in, thus helping you increase population. Serfs don’t care about all that, so you can just put them in undesirable locations with low-quality houses to keep them happy.
Get Security
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Next, you must fortify your village and make it safer for residents to live there. If you unlock the Village Fortification research under the Labor skill tree, you can get several security measures like Watchtowers and Watchposts. Place a couple of them within your residential area so your villagers will feel safe and grow the population.
Provide Food and Water
Food scarcity can be a big issue early in the game, so you must implement farms for crops and livestock to get a steady supply of food. You can even set up a marketplace to buy or sell commodities, and even manufacture more complex recipes like bread to keep your villagers full for a while. If you have settlements near water bodies, then you can build wells to draw water and supply clean drinking water to your citizens.
Get Places of Entertainment
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After that, you can work on fulfilling other needs of your villagers. Once their housing and food requirements are met, you need to provide entertainment. A Tavern in your village will be the place for that, plus you can manufacture beer to sell for profit. You can also place several city accessories like statues, lamp posts, and other items that will help beautify the streets and make it more homely. Later on, you can also build a Church as a source of entertainment to your villagers.
Give Jobs to Villagers
Giving your villagers something to do throughout the day is one of the crucial elements to Foundation. If you have several workstations built, don’t keep them idle. Rather, assign your villagers to take up jobs and increase production. It is best to build these production hubs near settlements, so it gets easier for villagers to go back and forth from their homes to their workplaces.
Fulfill Needs via the Marketplace
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![](https://thegameslayer.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Everything-on-Increasing-Population-in-Foundation-1.0-Tips-on-Improving-Population-3-1024x576.png)
Your marketplace is where your villagers will spend most of their time trying to collect resources like food, clothing, and other items. They can also work here as Traders to exchange goods and services. Having a couple of marketplaces in each settlement is a good idea to keep your villagers’ needs met. You can also check out the resource tab on top of the screen to see what is lacking and what requires fulfillment.
Keep Expanding and Upgrading Settlements
You need to keep expanding your settlement to accommodate more villagers as your population keeps growing, and each time it grows, their demands will also increase. You need to keep a check on your villages by utilizing all the options at the top of the screen to know what is lacking and what can be improved. Gradually, you can increase your population and, in turn, get better turnout in terms of production for your settlements.
Gradually, you will see a rapid increase in villagers flocking to your settlements, and you can utilize their skills to improve your city. If you are running short on cash to keep things going, then you can check out our easy money making guide to know more.